Movies, Great and Good

“When Is a Movie Great?” David Thomson asks in the July issue of Harper’s. And the succinct version of the answer he gives is: before the mid-seventies, when, in his view, Spielberg, Lucas, and company turned studios away from character-based dramas on so-called grown-up themes and toward the teen-centered blockbuster; before the nineteen-eighties, when the rise of home video shifted the art form from a collective spectacle experienced in theatres to a domestically consumed on-demand distraction; and certainly before the turn of the twenty-first century, when the ubiquity of computer technology turned movie-makers’ attention from story and character to special effects. (It’s worth adding that the movies he deems great—“The Night of the Hunter,” “Citizen Kane,” “The Birth of a Nation,” “Sunrise,” and “The Godfather”—are all Hollywood movies, so his idea of a “when” also entails a “where.”)

Most of all, what Thomson thinks made great films of earlier days great—and what he thinks is missing from the films of our time—is that they make us “believe we are observing a real world, and it is a place where we are tempted to be.” He defines “the age-old allure of cinema—the idea of wanting to be there and believing the screened world was real or fit to be shared imaginatively.” He continues,

Our films are artificial now, and we are nostalgic for substance. More and more, in America, we fear the loss of reality, so its imprint in old movies can be heartbreaking.

Thomson’s complaint is similar to the one that other commentators make about religion or so-called community standards and norms: we used to believe what we were told, and our belief provided shared values (or, at least, we used to be cowed into giving lip service to the values we were expected to hold, and into living by them—or at least, into pretending to do so). Thomson’s vision of classic cinema is, in effect, religious: people, he thinks, used to believe what they were being told by Hollywood, just as they used to believe what they were fed by the clergy and by politicians, and the loss of belief in an official, top-down version of reality has let out the dogs of skepticism, free-thinking, and individualism. What Thomson thinks has been lost in the familiar sense of cinematic reality, is, in fact, something gained—in diversity of realities, outer and inner.

What Thomson looks at longingly is the filmmaker’s—or the studio’s—authority, his (and rarely “her”) power—the power to create a convincing simulacrum of the world. And what has changed is not the ability to simulate but the audience’s readiness to be convinced. Now, audiences are harder to fool. Everyone gets the laws of genre, the idea of C.G.I., the business decisions that go into the making of a movie, the behind-the-scenes process of a shoot, the makeup and the spotlights and the ballyhoo and the panoply of what Orson Welles called “poor tricks.” No one seriously doubts the emotional power of movies; pretty much everyone is aware of movies as manipulations that range from the benignly diverting to the malevolently propagandistic.

An art form becomes reflexive at the point that its artifices are widely understood. Filmmakers’ widely varied and audacious responses to their own, and to viewers’, questioning of cinematic authority range from the vastly unreal yet engrossingly detailed comic-like blockbusters, the pop-culture-savvy confections of Pixar, the movie-mad ones of Quentin Tarantino, the exquisitely styled and widely allusive ones of Wes Anderson, or David Fincher’s cyclotronic explorations of the digital realm. (And that’s just Hollywood.) And some of them are mightily moving and excitingly beautiful.

Yet Thomson seems nostalgic for another sort of authority as well—for that of the Hollywood studios, when they were the only game in town. In the era he loves—that of sound films from the thirties through the seventies—making movies meant making them in Hollywood or going home empty-handed. Now, there’s the option of independent filmmaking at all levels, ranging from those who shoot on video on mid-three-figure budgets all they way up to “Black Swan” (and for all Thomson’s grousing about special effects, that’s a movie that makes brilliant, distinctively realistic and even hyper-realistic use of them, as I discussed earlier). And, here, too, with independent production comes aesthetic, stylistic, moral, personal, subjective, and emotional diversity to match. (And, of course, among the greatest of filmmakers in the era Thomson loves is John Cassavetes, whose distinctiveness as an artist is reflected in his distance from the studios and in the difficulties he faced when he did work with them.)

What Thomson overlooks, with his blanket dismissal of the modern cinema (and it’s not clear that in fact he’s interested in anything modern, whether Antonioni or Godard, Akerman or Jia Zhangke), is highlighted by his fixation on Francis Ford Coppola’s early masterwork. Coppola may no longer be able to deliver, with epic-scale industrial machinery, a whole lost world, as he did in “The Godfather” saga. But his daughter, Sofia Coppola can, in “Somewhere,” reflect, with an intimate, porous, personal, and hands-on aesthetic—and a style that’s both modest and audacious, exquisite and curious, confected and investigative (a daughter through her father’s eyes and that father through his daughter’s eyes)—not the world whole, not the whole world, not even a world, but part of the world, several worlds among many.

Viewers may be justifiably suspicious of those who now lay claim to doing more, to giving us their version of the whole damn thing. And that’s why Thomson is ready to satirize F. W. Murnau’s “Sunrise,” and why so many, now, reject the vast ambitions of Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” or any recent film by Jean-Luc Godard, the filmmaker of paradox whose ambitions have only gotten sublimely bigger even as his image-making and way of working have become more hands-on and homemade.

I hear from afar the gnashing of teeth as critics rise on the balls of their feet to bellow: “Do you really think that ‘Somewhere’ is as great as ‘The Godfather’?” No, but I think that “Somewhere” is as good as “The Godfather.” And maybe figuring out what makes a movie good would be a more useful—and less bombastic and authoritarian—critical activity. Maybe looking back nostalgically to an era of prostrate submission to the gods of thunder and lightning—to an age of eyes cast skyward in uninformed awe—is a less valuable kind of critical work than reckoning with the surprisingly diverse beauties and wonders that arise from people living and working cinematically, with their heads up and their eyes looking widely around—or looking others or even themselves in the face—in every kind of weather.

P.S. It’s fascinating—and revealing—to note that, in the same issue of Harper’s, the article immediately following Thomson’s is “Ouagadougou Nights,” by Christopher Vourlias, about the African film festival FESPACO and the films that issue from there. Vourlias’s excellent report mentions a festival screening of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s “A Screaming Man,” which I wrote about when it opened here earlier this year. After the FESPACO screening, Vourlias writes, “The mood of something great having been witnessed and shared lingered over Ouagadougou throughout the week.” I agree; would Thomson, with his nostalgia for one particular brand of greatness?